Economic Scene; Trade Benefits For Both Sides

THOUGH there is tough industrial and regional resistance to be overcome on both sides of the border, high officials are ecstatic about the new United States-Canada trade agreement.

President Reagan and Prime Minister Brian Mulroney hailed it as ''historic.'' In an interview yesterday, Clayton K. Yeutter, the United States trade repesentative, declared: ''We have not had a more significant bilateral trade negotiation, not in the past 200 years, and we will not in the next 200 years. It's more than positive - it's a major net plus on both sides.''

Sylvia Ostry, Canada's ambassador for multilateral trade talks, agreed that both sides would benefit. But she said the relative benefits for Canada would be greater in the short run with its increased access to the much larger American market.

Stephen Blank, director of the Institute for United States-Canadian Business Studies at Pace University, also said Canada would gain more in the short run but that America would gain ''in the middle run'' as the countries ''keep on moving toward closer integration.''

These are new areas high on the agenda for the Uruguay Round, agreed to at Punta del Este, under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. ''The Uruguay Round offers a challenge and an opportunity not just for trade ministries but for government policy as a whole,'' Mrs. Ostry said in her lecture last week at the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. A successful Uruguay Round would spur economic growth, stabilize exchange rates and ease the debt crisis, for expanded trade holds the key to all.

In the original Bretton Woods plan after World War II, an International Trade Organization was to be the third leg of the world economic system (with the I.M.F. and World Bank as the two others). But the I.T.O. was never created; instead a relatively weak GATT was. Now the original challenge of a stronger trading organization has been revived.

The challenge comes, Mrs. Ostry held, at a time of unique transformation in the world economy: the trade imbalances, with the United States in deep deficit and other industrial nations in heavy surplus; the information revolution linking financial markets and production and the emergence of a multipolar world, with the American, Japanese and West German economies the main centers -but centers that could split apart in a crisis.

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Holding the world economy together will require changes in domestic and multilateral decision-making, she said; the alternative is a trading system that ''no government planned or desired.''

The danger is that multilateral trade will give way to industrial cartels and walled-in regional blocs - or national autarky, which would mean falling production and living standards and intense political strains. The difficult job of national leaders is to convince their people that free-trade agreements like the United States-Canadian deal are in each country's own best interest.

Prime Minister Mulroney told Canadians that the new agreement with the United States would add 350,000 jobs in Canada over the next 10 years and lift real growth by 5 percent. These numbers, generated by an econometric model, are not to be taken literally. Yet there is reason to expect that Canada will enjoy stronger growth in employment and output as it benefits from the economies of scale by opening up its trade with the United States and becomes better able to compete in the world.

The bilateral trade agreement should also make Canada a magnet for more capital investment from the United States and other countries. To many Canadians, gripped by their traditional nationalism, such capital inflow looks worrisome -an invasion of ''little Canada'' by foreign money.

Canadians must be persuaded that the capital invasion will raise living standards, widen opportunities, lower prices, increase competitiveness and modernize their nation's economic structure.

Yet this vision may not overcome the Canadians' fear of losing their national identity and separateness from the American behemoth. One obstacle in the trade talks, which the Americans could not break, was Canada's insistence on protecting its cultural industries, especially film, television and publishing. ''For the Canadian negotiators,'' Mr. Yeutter said, ''the strongest priorities were political; for us, the priorities were economic.''

For both sides, however, there can be substantial gains over time in closer economic integration, in access to resources and energy and in creating a model for a stronger world trading system. After having come so close to failure, both Governments felt a correspondingly greater lift in spirits. Now they will have to communicate this sense of excitement and opportunity to their people if this challenging ''agreement in principle'' is to live.

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A version of this article appears in print on October 7, 1987, on Page D00002 of the National edition with the headline: Economic Scene; Trade Benefits For Both Sides. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe